30 x 30 Archives

30 x 30

January 20, 2023

US politics complicates bid to protect nature

By Shannon Kelleher

It’s been a month since the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) ended with a historic international agreement aimed at expanding efforts to protect and preserve land, water and ecosystems around the globe.

Now the more than 190 countries that approved the ambitious plan to protect 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030 – among other goals- are faced with how to turn their promises into political realities.

In the United States, efforts to counteract the extinction crisis must contend with a unique set of challenges. Not only did the US sit on the sidelines at COP15, declining to join in the agreement, but newly strengthened Republican forces in Congress signal that progress on protecting nature won’t come easy.

Last year, Republican congressmembers introduced the “30 x 30 Termination Act,” which would overturn a Biden Administration’s conservation plan very similar to a target in the Global Biodiversity Framework adopted at COP15. Republicans call the plan a “land grab.” While the act has so far failed to pass, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado plans to reintroduce it now that Republicans control the US House of Representatives.

The situation at the federal level has environmental advocates worried.

“We’re not playing at the international level and we’re not taking [the extinction crisis] seriously on our own soil,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

But even as politics threaten to hold conservation progress captive at the national scale, states, tribes, and local communities across the US are ramping up their own conservation efforts to confront the nation’s extinction crisis.

December 18, 2022

After two tense weeks, world awaits COP15 plan to save Earth’s species

The clock is ticking in Montreal, Canada as representatives from over 190 countries wrap up two tense weeks of negotiations over a framework to reverse Earth’s extinction crisis. The United Nations meeting, known as COP15, is set to conclude Monday.

Clashes over how to finance the plan, among other obstacles, have led to uncertainties about the meeting’s prospects for success. However, yesterday COP15 president Huang Runqiu, China’s Minister of Ecology and Environment, announced he would release a text of the final framework on Sunday.

The convention’s timing couldn’t be more critical. Human activities such as deforestation, overfishing, and agriculture have driven an estimated one million species to the brink of extinction.

“It’s a really, really important meeting in which, in a way, the future of the planet is at stake,” said Patricia Balvanera, a professor at the Center for Ecosystem Research at the National University of Mexico.

COP15, which was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, centers around finalizing the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, an ambitious document designed to steer the world towards its 2050 vision of “living in harmony with nature.” The first draft contains 21 targets to be completed by 2030, which include protecting 30% of global land and oceans (the 30×30 initiative), restoring 3 billion hectares, and halting species extinctions. The framework would replace the failed Aichi targets set in 2010 and comes on the heels of the COP27 climate change conference that took place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in November.

While the US has never ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity, the 1992 agreement on which COP15 and previous meetings are based, the US committed to a 30×30 target in 2021 and has sent representatives to Montreal.